ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author chronicles the activism on behalf of protecting this recovered place, renamed in the twentieth century ‘The African Burial Ground’. It illustrates the strained belonging of people of African descent within American political culture, which continues to this day. In 1991, New Yorkers were stunned to learn that beneath the streets and buildings of lower Manhattan, New York City, were burials of some of the city’s earliest denizens, subsequently left voiceless and forgotten: historical populations of African descent, many of whom had been enslaved. Given that this burial place was long forgotten, the activism relating to it became an exercise in collective memory-recovery both of the ground and its original inhabitants. During its use, this Burial Ground was not only a personal and family resting place, but it embodied the era’s social conditions of violent exclusion – physically and symbolically.
